Saturday, February 5, 2011

Book 6: Pornified, by Pamela Paul

The subtitle of this book, "How Pornography is Damaging our Lives, our Relationships, and our Families," should have tipped me off that this book was going to be full of terrible biases, but unfortunately it did not. Ms. Paul based her book on extreme examples of porn "users" - men in stereotypically antisocial professions who viewed pornography for 5 or more hours a week - a long time to be jerking off in front of a computer. Or so says my husband, who used to work for a porn store, and thus my most accessible "authority" on the topic. Also male, so that must count for something, too.

Anyway, Paul goes on to suggest that watching porn will lead you to neglect your family, become deeply interested in worse and worse pornography, until you find yourself masturbating to child porn and contemplating molesting your young female family members. She seems to make no appreciable discernment between pornography involving such activities as simulated rape, golden showers, and double penetration from more "softcore," two-person male-and-female pornography. She interchanges the words "porn" and "cybersex," not appreciating what seems to be a clear distinction between looking at pictures/watching videos online and actually participating in cybersex, where one (or more?) other people are involved.

Ultimately, Paul seems to suggest that the Internet be censored in the United States, since other countries cannot be trusted to hold the same standards as we do.

2 comments:

Porn should not be the scapegoat for people molesting children. And pictures/videos/ect of illegal acts are illegal themselves, which is about as far as you can take it. She just needs to accept that everything that's illegal is inevitibly on the internet, & even if censored, those perpetrators would find some way to distribute it.

I think that she is laying blame on the wrong thing. Do we blame the alcohol if a person drinks too much? If a person chooses to spend that much time watching porn there is something wrong with the person not the fact that there is porn in the world. I also find the slippery slop mentality offending. A person can watch porn, maybe even enjoy it and go on with their lives with out it leading to child porn and molestation. Molestation happens and it is not the fault of the porn industry it is the fault of the person molesting the child. This is just a scape goat strategy to pass the blame of societies ills. People do bad things there does not need to be a cause that we understand.